World Cafe Next: San Fermin

The World Cafe: Next pick for this week, San Fermin, is a vehicle for the writing and arranging of Brooklyn composer Ellis Ludwig-Leone. He created the album San Fermin after graduating from Yale with a music degree. The 24-year-old then cast his friends — vocalist Allen Tate and Lucius' Jess Wolfe and Holly Laessig — to breathe life into the characters he'd written. As Ludwig-Leone puts it, the subject matter is "life's top-shelf issues: youth, nostalgia, anxiety and unrequited love."

Two songs from San Fermin's debut are available for download in our weekly World Cafe: Next podcast.